Topics Menu

More Menu

Introduction to Climate Progress

For newcomers, this is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress. Regular readers will find links to some of our best content on climate and clean energy, continually updated. Please post in the comments any suggestions you have for what you would like to see on this page.

We try to inform and entertain here — and be a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants the inside view on climate science, solutions, and politics. A key goal is to save readers’ time, save you from wading through the sea of irrelevant information — or outright disinformation — on climate and energy that pervades the media and blogosphere.

Climate Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was launched in August 2006, with me posting only once (!) a day. Over time, this blog morphed into a true community of interest on climate and energy, with some of the top experts and activists guest posting, sharing their thoughts in interviews, and even commenting regularly, people like Bill McKibben.

I was also Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 1997, where I oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. So this blog focuses as much on solutions as it does on science and politics. You can read a longer bio here.

Advertisement

Last year, we added a first-rate reporter Stephen Lacey, who is now Deputy Editor for Climate Progress. He edits content for publication and writes on a variety of clean energy issues. Before joining Climate Progress, he was an editor/producer with RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

In 2009, Time named me a “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” I write from what I call a climate realist perspective — the emerging scientific view that on our current greenhouse gas emissions path we are poised to destroy the livability of the climate for 1,000 years. The most important post that lays out that case is:

We also spend a lot of time describing the solution(s). Fundamentally we have most of the needed technology now (or soon will), and avoiding catastrophe requires only a very small fraction of the nation’s and world’s wealth — one tenth of a penny on the dollar:

Stephen Lacey has created a portfolio of chart-filled posts that dive deeper into the individual clean energy solutions and how they have been starting to achieve significant market penetration and drop in cost: